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Tom Hayden, a leader of S.D.S. and now a California state assemblyman, may sometimes have shared the radicals' feelings of cynicism and contempt for Bobby Kennedy, at least while Kennedy lived. But Hayden went to St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and wept at Kennedy's casket, holding a Cuban fatigue cap in his hand. The year had many legacies, but the assassinations were among the most important and were the hardest to bear. They altered history and broke something essential in the national morale -- they broke hope. "The best leaders of our time were dead," Hayden says now. "They had been murdered. That is the heart of the tragedy. By 1968 I knew I was part of an apocalypse, which is different from the early idealism. You feel you are carried by events that are out of your control."
Hayden thinks Kennedy would have won the Democratic nomination in 1968 and then gone on to defeat Richard Nixon in November and served two terms in the White House, leaving office in January 1977. Richard Goodwin worked as an adviser and speechwriter for both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. He remembers talking to Bobby on the night he was killed. "He believed," recalls Goodwin, "that he probably wouldn't get the nomination. He was sure that Johnson would do anything to stop him." Goodwin shared Kennedy's pessimism at the time, but now, 20 years later, says the nomination could have been won. The way the Chicago convention evolved and erupted, Goodwin reasons, would have played to Kennedy's strengths.
What if Bobby Kennedy had lived and been elected President? It can be argued that Sirhan Sirhan's nihilistic gesture changed American history more profoundly than any other event since the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Without Sirhan, would there have been no Nixon, no Watergate, and possibly therefore no Jimmy Carter, and possibly therefore no Ronald Reagan? The long historical tumble of the past 20 years may have begun in that hotel serving pantry. Of course, that sort of hypothesis is merely a fantastic antiworld. Such speculations are idle and infinite.
In any case, with Kennedy's death, a large number of the American young felt that they had become disenfranchised and were now orphaned from the nation's political system.
What is lost when heroes vanish? Henry David Thoreau (a man who would have been at home in 1968) wrote an enigmatic throwaway line in Walden: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle dove, and am still on their $ trail." The words, vaguely allegorical and haunting, have something in common with Paul Simon's "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" One has only to inspect the field of presidential candidates in 1988 to feel a sense of some hero loss in the drama of American life.
Perhaps it is an immature impulse to wish for heroes. In the early '80s many of the young adopted the oldest American President, Ronald Reagan, as a kind of hero -- not a moral or political hero exactly, but rather a sort of hero of attitude, not a leader so much as a prince of nonchalance. That sort of hero does not nourish much, or perform the hero's function of inspiring people to be better, to do better.